(CNN) - Turkey's foreign minister insisted Thursday that it's not "realistic" for the world to expect it to go it alone in launching a ground operation against ISIS, even as a monitoring group said the extremists had seized a chunk of a key battleground town near its border.

Speaking alongside visiting NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Mevlut Cavusoglu said that airstrikes alone cannot change the balance of power or "clean the whole region of ISIS and other terrorists."

The remarks will dismay many in Turkey who have demanded military intervention in Syria.

Turkey has taken in more than 1.5 million people from Syria and Iraq, Cavusoglu said, including some 200,000 Syrians from the Kobani region in recent days.

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